“Every day, people are bombarded with information — from television, the internet, the radio and more. But if you want to get people to engage on issues that matter, there is nothing as powerful as a face-to-face conversation. It’s an opportunity to educate people on important issues, and give them the chance to take action. And when thousands of informed people make their voices heard, that’s the kind of people power that makes real change happen.”

U.S. Senator Mark Udall glances down at phone packet and talking point materials while waiting to be introduced at a canvass kickoff campaign on October 25, 2014 in Thornton, Colorado. Marc Piscotty/Getty Images

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There’s a refrain we hear about political campaigns every electioncycle: "thisyear, campaigns waged an unprecedented ground game, having a face-to-face conversation with almost every single voter."

Baloney. As academics who study campaigns, we hear this claim all the time. But we also know it’s important to investigate whether data backs it up. We did. And it doesn’t. In fact, there’s a paradox at the heart of American campaign craft. Mountains of rigorous research show that campaigns should be having personal conversations with voters at their doors. But, campaigns spend almost all their money on TV ads — and, every year, most voters say they’ve never had a conversation about the election at their door. What gives?

Why campaigns’ "ground game" matters

By far the most effective way to turn out voters is with high-quality, face-to-face conversations that urge them to vote. How do we know? Nearly two decades of rigorous randomized experiments have proven it.

The experiment found that voters called on the phone or sent postcards were not noticeably more likely to vote than those sent nothing. But canvassing was different. Just one in-person conversation had a profound effect on a voter’s likelihood to go to the polls, boosting turnout by a whopping 20 percent (or around 9 percentage points).

The nearly two decades since Gerber and Green’s first experiment have consistently borne out their finding that personal conversations have special political potency. Hundreds of academics and campaigns have tested the impacts of various campaign tactics with randomized field trials. High-quality canvassing operations emerge as consistent vote-winners. On the other hand, impersonal methods have consistently failed to produce cost-effective results, no matter how you slice the data or which populations researchers examine.

Quality counts: field operations’ "knock" numbers don’t tell you much

Volunteers from the Yes campaign speak with a voter as they canvass for support for the Yes vote in the Pilton area of Edinburgh on September 16, 2014 in Edinburgh, Scotland. (Matt Cardy/Getty Images)

Given the widely acknowledged importance of a good "ground game," campaigns like to tout statistics that show they’re knocking on huge numbers of doors. These statistics can make their ground games sound quite substantial.

But, in reality, large "knock" numbers often conceal lackluster ground games. Why? Campaign operatives often rush through neighborhoods, hurrying to rack up impressive numbers of "knocks." However, these hurried efforts often fail to reach most voters at all and entail only perfunctory interactions with the voters they do. Campaigns’ ground games can thus sound sizable in terms of "knocks" when they haven’t had any conversations with voters at all.

But facilitating that breed of genuine personal outreach isn’t what many "field" campaigns actually do. Green has seen this in practice. He has found that many canvassing operations have effects "smaller than what we obtained from our initial study or in our follow-up experiments with seasoned groups such as ACORN." But, Green went on to say, "When I'd inquire about the details of these sub-par canvassing efforts, I would often discover that the scripts were awkward or that there was limited attention to training and supervision."

This suggests a picture that should frighten candidates, campaign managers, and donors alike. Even if field operatives have racked up millions of "door knocks," when one looks under the hood of these operations, there often isn’t much reason to believe they’re having many quality conversations with voters at all.

Voters aren’t seeing the ground game

Another reason to doubt campaigns are running good ground games? Voters don’t appear to be seeing them.

A political organization running a field campaign shared data with us that helps quantify just how invisible the ground game is to the very voters supposedly being inundated with it. (The organization requested anonymity when making public their internal research findings.) During October 2014, this organization ran a field campaign in a hotly contested Midwestern gubernatorial race. According to most accounts, this gubernatorial race witnessed the same all-out ground game as other elections this year, and this organization should thus be thought of as only one of many blanketing supportive voters with personal conversations urging them to vote.

What this organization did allows us to critically evaluate how widespread the ground game was — it ran an experiment in which some voters it was targeting were randomly assigned to receive a knock on their door from organization field staffers while others, a "control group," received no contact from the organization (but still received identical efforts from other groups). After the election, this organization conducted an ostensibly unrelated survey in which they asked voters in the two groups what campaign contact they recalled receiving over the last few weeks from any political organization.

The results? The "control" group who received no contact from this organization remembered getting a knock on the door from any campaign only about 21% of the time. But just one conversation at the door from this organization doubled that figure, to over 40%. With just one contact yielding such a large increase, it's hard to believe the ground game in that race reached anything near saturation.

But what about for mail, phone, and television-based appeals? The numbers for these modes show exactly the opposite: voters were saturated. This organization found that around 9 in 10 voters it targeted recalled receiving phone calls, mailers, or seeing TV ads about the same election. The disparity between these numbers and the same figures for field raise questions about the idea that the ground game is already in full swing.

Source: Survey of voters targeted by campaign in Midwestern gubernatorial race in control group who did not receive canvassing.

(Data from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study reveal a similar disparity — a majority of Democratic voters in swing states in 2010 and 2012 recall receiving phone and mail contact, but almost no voters recall someone knocking on their door.)

Spending more on unproven TV ads than on canvassing

The same disparity between field and other techniques manifests in patterns of campaign spending. A recent investigation by the New York Times provides a window into how SuperPACs spent their dollars over the last three election cycles. The results are puzzling. Over 80% of these groups’ spending went to TV advertising, followed by mail and online advertising to round out about 90% of spending in total. Finally, in a distant fourth, came field work — capturing less than 5% of campaigns’ budgets.

Somehow, many campaigns aren’t managing to spend much more on the most effective form of voter contact than on radio.

But, even though campaigns spend a very large share of their budget on TV ads, the research on the impacts of TV ads doesn’t bear out the idea that they powerfully influence elections:

Even if TV ads provide fodder for much punditry or look impressive in a focus group, there’s not much reason to believe they have lasting impacts on voters’ views or behavior.

Why aren’t more campaigns focused on having personal conversations with voters?

Campaign consultants, like Republican Mike Murphy (left) and Democrat Bob Shrum (right) typically make more when campaigns spend on ads than when they spend on field operations. (Alex Wong/Getty Images for Meet the Press)

We academics are still scratching our heads about this one. Here, we’ll mention just a few possibilities.

First, managing a canvass operation is difficult and requires considerable recruitment, training, and supervision. It’s a lot easier to write a check to an ad agency or mail firm.

It’s also gotten harder to raise a field army. Decades ago, a rich network of civic organizations — think churches, Elk Lodges, and labor unions — could supply ample volunteers for field work. But, as these organizations’ memberships have flagged, professionally-managed, centralized, DC-based groups with weaker grassroots ties have tended to take their place. As a result, knocking on millions of doors now requires recruiting tens of thousands of temporary field staffers or new volunteers. When faced with a logistical challenge of that scale, it becomes mighty appealing to write a check to an ad firm instead.

Campaigns can do better

As effective as high quality field campaigns are today, they’re likelier to get even better as the research improves. Recent research has shown that the power of personal conversations extend far beyond voter mobilization, and include the potential to build lasting support for marriage equality and abortion. Successful turnout interventions also seem to have lasting impacts on individuals, leading them to become lifelong voters, as well as on their cohabitants. But to take advantage of these innovations, campaigns need to seriously increase their focus on field.

The good news is, the necessary financial resources for waging real ground games are already available — campaigns just have to spend their money right. Consider what would happen if campaigns diverted just some of the money they currently spend on TV towards field. Nearly $1.2 billion was spent on TV ads during the 2014 election cycle, capturing about a third of campaign spending. Imagine if campaigns diverted just 30% of that amount to field, for a $350 million ground game — many times more than the amount campaigns actually spent on field this year. Field operatives can often be hired for about $20 an hour (including overhead) and could have two high-quality 20 minute long conversations with voters every hour, for about $10 per conversation. That all adds up to a staggering reality: campaigns could have had a 20 minute conversation with every single registered voter in a state with a close Senate race — and still afford to blanket the airwaves with ads.

Waging a high-quality ground game isn’t easy — but no one said winning elections was. Before 2016, candidates and campaign consultants need to take a hard look at the science, lest the ground game take a back seat yet again. We may need to knock on their doors, too.

Connecticut State Representative Gregg Haddad recently posted a video offering his support for an Updated Bottle Bill after receiving over 1700 petitions from his constituents in Mansfield, CT. These petitions were gathered by ConnPIRG canvassers, who have been going door-to-door gathering citizen support to update the state's Bottle Bill so that it covers more types of bottles, and encourages more recycling in the state.

Why have conservatives been winning so many political campaigns and policy battles in the past quarter century? Why have so many low- and moderate-income Americans, whose living standards have flatlined, dropped out of the political process? And what will it take to build a winning progressive movement and breathe new life into American democracy?

These questions deserve to be debated in the progressive community, and one prolific writer engaging with them is sociologist Dana Fisher, author of a recent book, Activism, Inc.: How the Outsourcing of Grassroots Campaigns Is Strangling Progressive Politics in America, and many articles, including “The Activism Industry,” which appeared in The American Prospect Online. (This piece is the source of the contentions that I'm quoting and responding to here.) Fisher asks many of the right questions about the conservative ascendancy and the progressive eclipse. Unfortunately, she concentrates her criticism on one progressive tool -- canvassing programs which attempt to recruit members and raise funds by going door to door. Repeatedly using the word "outsourcing," she compares canvassing to "corporations that hire workers in India to run their call centers" and claims that it "increases the distance between members and the progressive national groups that claim to represent them" and "leaves the grassroots base on the left disconnected and disorganized."

Like most single-cause explanations of complex problems, Fisher's thesis is faulty. By offering a blanket condemnation of canvassing based on limited evidence, Fisher ignores the diverse range of issues on which canvassing has been used -- and the extent to which it has been proven successful. Indeed, canvassing is one of the all-too-few progressive success stories of the past three decades, and by making it the scapegoat for progressive decline, Fisher risks short-circuiting the thoroughgoing review of progressive strategies and tactics that we so urgently need.

Fisher studied only one national canvassing operation -- the Fund for Public Interest Research -- and bases her conclusions on what she believes she found there. But while the Fund does account for about a third of all progressive canvassing programs, there are other such networks, including Progressive Action Network, Citizens Campaigns Network (created by Clean Water Action), and the Hudson Bay Company, as well as canvassing efforts tied to individual organizations. Such operations generally do not conform to Fisher's grim conclusions, and instead play a positive role in progressive politics. Progressive canvassing helps organizations build membership, raise money, and develop leaders and activists -- especially among the canvassers but also among the people they canvass. That is how we have built and grown many statewide and national organizations, such as Citizen Action of Wisconsin and the Connecticut Citizen Action Group. Hundreds of leaders of citizens groups, staffers for other progressive organizations such as labor unions, and even elected officials got their start through canvassing.

In fact, far from representing an unhealthy "professionalization" of citizen activism, canvassing is a profoundly small-d democratic way to organize. It involves people talking to one another about public issues and asking them to take action. Unlike direct mail or robo-calls, canvassing involves human interaction. Unlike Internet organizing, canvassing involves face-to-face personal contact.

Moreover, canvassing gives people the sense that they matter. It alerts them to the issues that their elected officials are engaging and encourages them to hold those officials accountable by letting them know the public is watching and concerned. How much more democratic can you get? In the era of “Bowling Alone,” canvassing is part of the solution to, not part of the problem of, declining civic engagement.

Nor does progressive canvassing bear any resemblance to corporate outsourcing -- unless one sees no difference between activists ringing doorbells in Illinois and companies sending American jobs to call centers in India. Most canvassers live in the communities in which they work, and they are genuinely committed to progressive causes: They are not hired hands who canvass for lower energy prices today and higher energy prices tomorrow. In fact, canvassing goals and priorities are usually set by local or state organizations. Canvassing efforts, and the resources that they generate, are not something that a large donor can give or take away.

And canvassing does not, as Fisher contends, discourage the people who participate in it from remaining active in progressive causes. Yes, many canvassers conclude that this kind of work isn't for them, just as many people leave other demanding jobs, including teaching, nursing, and social work. But a good portion of canvassers find that they want to dedicate their lives to progressive activism. It's worth noting that, while Fisher writes that almost all the canvassers she studied are very young, more than one-quarter of the people at a recent conference of progressive canvassers were over 45.

More importantly, canvassing encourages participation in civic life. According to Fisher's own interviews (described on page 57 and 58 of her book), most canvassers say that the experience gave them a chance to participate in the political process on a regular basis, not just during elections, and that they intended to stay in politics after spending a summer going door to door. As Fisher puts it in the book, "Most of them followed through: within the year, 95 percent had written or telephoned an editor or a public official, or had signed a petition about issues that concerned them; 79 percent had attended a public meeting; 77 percent had voted in a national or state election; and 72 percent had participated in a protest or boycott."

So does progressive canvassing hinder progressive politics? Quite the contrary.

Canvassing operations root progressive organizations in Main Street America. For progressive politics to “play in Peoria,” we have to actually talk to people in Peoria. That's what canvassing does. Through such efforts, we hear what people are saying on their doorsteps, we respond to it, and, in the process, we improve our arguments.

Canvassing forces our organizations to talk to people who don't agree with them, find ways to tie people together in a broader national community, and frame issues to have the broadest possible appeal. All that is good for our organizations, good for progressive politics, and good for American democracy.

Because of these strengths, canvassing helps progressives win legislative and electoral victories. Thanks, in large measure, to canvassing campaigns, environmental activists helped win a federal Superfund to clean up toxic wastes, a better Clean Water Act, and protections for nearly 60 million acres of national forests. Canvassing also helped defeat the partial privatization of Social Security. In California, canvassing helped pass a law and, later, a ballot initiative requiring that the state generate a portion of its power from renewable sources. There have been many similar victories on the local, state, and national levels, from the 1980s to the present day.

Canvassing is just as effective in electoral politics. In a survey conducted after the 1998 elections, the public opinion analyst Celinda Lake found that the members of Citizen Action of Wisconsin -- many of whom joined after meeting canvassers -- voted as consistently Democratic as union members. In a more recent survey, the political scientist Donald Green found that people who have been canvassed are 20 percent more likely to vote than those who have not been canvassed. It is also one of the few ways to obtain small, individual donations on a scale that can have real electoral impact under current campaign finance laws.

So is every canvass perfect? Of course not. Is there room for improvement? Of course there is. Certainly, some other ways of connecting with people -- in churches or union halls -- are more effective for building in-depth relationships. But these methods may not reach as many people. As with all our tactics, we need to take a hard look at canvassing, fix what is wrong with it, and build on what is best about it. We should make even more of an attempt to connect canvassers' efforts with other effective and empowering methods for building a progressive movement and a better America.

Heather Booth has been an organizer for social justice since the civil rights and early women's movement, working on issues and politics. She was the founder of Midwest Academy training center and Citizen Action, and is a Vice President of USAction.

This
is a great video from OSPIRG that goes through their Ag Subsidies
campaign, outlining the problem, solution, and what they are doing to stop
Congress from subsidizing high fructose corn syrup and other ingredients in
junk food. Part of their campaign
includes going door-to-door across the state, and along with other state PIRGs
across the country, to educate the public and build up support. In the first year they talked to over 800,000
Americans about this campaign.

PRLog recently posted an article about a group of
canvassers with Grassroots Campaigns, Inc. in New York. The article is about the experience of the
average canvasser, and the resounding message is that the canvassers are
able to stay positive and find success despite the challenges of the job. The canvassers talk about how they maintain a
positive attitude even when people don’t stop to talk to them, and also about
some of the skills they use to engage people.

Grassroots Campaigns, Inc: Have Clipboard, Will
CanvassPRLog—July 27, 2012
Katie Golieb assumed her ready position in the middle of a Park Slope sidewalk:
wide stance, hips swaying, clipboard cradled in her right arm. An approaching
woman in heels and a skirt, seeing that she had been marked, quickened her
step, but not before Ms. Golieb called out to her.

“Excuse me, ma’am, do you
have a minute for the A.C.L.U.?

“I’m working,” the woman
said as she brushed past.

“Oh, O.K.,” Ms. Golieb
replies cheerfully.

“Good luck!” the woman
yelled, now in the clear.

It is the twilight of the
canvassing season. Soon the college students, like Ms. Golieb, who bolster the
summer ranks of activist groups like Greenpeace and the Human Rights Campaign
will return to school.

The diminished presence of
canvassers will surely delight those New Yorkers who have become expert at
tracing wide arcs of avoidance on the city’s sidewalks.

But Ms. Golieb, who
attends Oberlin College, still has a few shifts left.

One recent afternoon, she
and three other canvassers for the American Civil Liberties Union stationed
themselves along Seventh Avenue between Union and President Streets. There,
hundreds of times a day, they criticize the Bush administration’s stance on
habeas corpus and urge passers-by the join the organization and donate the
recommended $30 a month.

“You’ve got to tell
yourself that people are busy, they do have things to do,” said Alex Waite, a
25-year-old field manager for Grassroots Campaigns, the consulting firm hired
by the A.C.L.U. to do the canvassing.

But Mr. Waite, a
gregarious politics buff, knows there are ways to spot the people who will
talk.

Eye contact is key. An
individual is a better bet than a pair. People at the front or rear of a group
are far more likely to respond than those buried in the middle. “If you have a
big group and you just yell out in general,” Mr. Waite said, “they’re all going
to pretend you’re talking to someone else.”

At one point, a cluster of
canvassers for the New York Public Interest Research Group, in matching
T-shirts, walked by.

“Hey, guys!” Mr. Waite said.

“We’ve got clipboards,
too!” a member of the group called out, as they marched on without stopping.

The Denver Post recently published an article by a
young woman who works for the American Civil Liberties Union about why she goes
door-to-door to register voters. With
the election coming up (and the voter registration deadline coming even faster)
it seemed important to post this article to remind people about the importance
of getting involved in our political process—whether that is going out
canvassing and registering voters yourself, or simply by going out and voting
to make sure your voice is heard.

Guest Commentary: Young voices, new voters

POSTED: 07/17/2012 01:00:00 AM MDTBy Rosalie Wilmot

I have been a political canvasser for
more than a year now. I've toiled under the sweltering summer sun while walking
blocks and blocks in search of young people who need to be registered.

I do this not because of a promise of
compensation, but rather because I believe that every person deserves the
opportunity to participate. I do it because I remember that the day I was
registered to vote, I was given something far more important than a piece of
yellow paper.

I was given a voice.

That's why this year, I am especially
concerned about my generation turning out at the polls and making their mark on
history. I have watched as voter photo identification bills and measures
limiting same-day registration have passed across the nation and large
percentages of the population have been excluded from the most fundamental
right we all share, the right to vote. I am worried because I know that these
measures make it more difficult for young voices to be heard. I know that these
"protections" largely make it more difficult for disenfranchised
people to participate.

The consequences of inaction can be
seen in our own communities. They are manifested in complacency and a disbelief
that our voices even matter. As a young voter, I remember my own process of
discovery.

Becoming a new voter is sort of like
being reborn. You register and then wait impatiently for your ballot to arrive.
You begin to pay closer attention when you hear of bills being introduced in
the legislature.

You begin to truly care about the
democratic process. When your ballot finally arrives by mail, you are mostly
ready. You unfold it neatly and pull out a fresh ballpoint pen. You carefully
fill in the little circles and watch the ink dry. When you stick it in the mail
— like a Christmas wish list to Santa — you have completed something worth
bragging about.

You have acted as a citizen.

This year in Denver, there are living
signs that the system itself is in need of care. Secretary of State Scott
Gessler wants to keep "inactive" voters from being sent mail ballots.
For many Coloradans, missing one election in the past may cost them the ability
to participate in future elections.

If you did not participate in the
last general election, you will be labeled an "inactive" voter and
might not receive a mail ballot.

However, despite these attempts at
voter suppression, there are also indicators of support for the democratic
process. This year, the 150 polling places around Denver will be complemented
by 13 voting centers with drive-up, drop-off service, along with 10 secure
ballot drop boxes with 24-hour accessibility. Posters are being hung in homeless
shelters, and iPad apps have been developed to increase accessibility for
seniors.

When we participate in our community
and focus on issues, we do have the power to create change. It begins with a
decision to participate — and is dependent on policies that make participation
possible.

This election, be ready.

Visit GoVoteColorado.com to check your status. If you have moved since the last
time you registered, you must re-register. Don't take it for granted; visit the
website to make certain.

The registration deadline for the
Nov. 6 general election is Oct. 9. If you are registering close to the deadline
at any location besides the Denver Elections Division, make sure they validate
your registration with a date and time stamp.

I have hope for democracy, which is
why I educate and prepare myself for upcoming elections. I pull on my volunteer
shirt and I set up a table to register voters. I talk to young people. I try to
hear their vast perspectives.

I remind myself, as well as others,
that our vote requires follow-up action and that we are the true watchdogs of
our own freedoms. Beyond our own acts as citizens, we also desperately need
elected officials who seek to expand opportunities, rather than suppress them.

Colorado: Let people vote.

Our voices are ready to be heard.

Rosalie Wilmot of Denver is a 2012
graduate of the University of Denver and a media intern at the ACLU of
Colorado.

Sofie, who has canvassed with the Fund for the past
four summers in Massachusetts, going door-to-door and talking to folks about
updating the state’s Bottle Bill, posted a tweet recently about how much she
appreciates the experience she has had working on this cause. Sofie wrote:

"I'm
so grateful to MASSPIRG and the Fund for giving me the opportunity to go
door to door for 4 summers on this issue and testify in front of the
legislature last summer ... I LOVE YOU PIRG, LET'S KEEP FIGHTING THE GOOD
FIGHT."

The Concord Insider, a publication of the Concord Monitor in New Hampshire, ran a glowing feature recently on their local Fund for the Public Interest canvass office. The article focuses a lot on the atmosphere of an office and what motivates its staff, with a cute bit about the start of a canvasser's day:

"Back in the office on Friday, half-drunk Dunkin' Donuts coffee cups mix in with the banter of a crew just getting into the heartbeat of a new day. Like in most offices, people gather in groups, making small talk and entering into the work culture. Unlike most offices, people are exchanging ideas, passions, high fives - while the Red Hot Chili Peppers urge them on from the boom box."

And a nice plug for the office's campaign work:

"The fund has had great success in actually changing laws and making an impact.

A list of accomplishments might look like this: Protect Lake Sunapee from storm runoff, check. Protect the Great Bay Estuary with research and recommended action plans, check. Raise money to fight changes in the Clean Water Act that leave New Hampshire's streams and lakes open to unlimited dumping of toxins, check. Stop childhood obesity in its tracks - well, working on it."